Site Speed - Are You Fast? Does it Matter for&nbspSEO?

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

When Google made their “page speed is now a ranking factor” announcement, it wasn’t a significant new ranking factor, but it is significant because it means Google wants to use usability metrics to help rank pages. Your site speed should be a priority as slow sites decrease customer satisfaction and research has shown that an improvement in site speed can increase conversions.

To better understand how fast the web is (as of February 2011), I collected site speed data from approximately 100 different sites. This data allowed me to create a very close approximation of the equation that Google currently uses to report (in Webmaster Tools) how fast sites are relative to each other:

y = 122.32e-0.31x

In this equation, x is the time it takes your page to load (in seconds) and the result, y is approximately the percent of pages that your page is faster than. If you grab your load time from Google Webmaster Tools, you can use this equation to gauge how fast you are compared to the rest of the web. If you don’t want to bust out your calculator, grab this spreadsheet and use the calculator I set up.This equation is charted in the graph below.

The x axis in this graph shows the page load time (in seconds) and the y axis represents the per cent of sites that the corresponding time is faster than. So if a page loads in 4.3 seconds, it is faster than 31% of other pages on the web.

This data set allowed me to view the following data points:

If your site loads in 5 seconds it is faster than approximately 25% of the web

If your site loads in 2.9 seconds it is faster than approximately 50% of the web

If your site loads in 1.7 seconds it is faster than approximately 75% of the web

If your site loads in 0.8 seconds it is faster than approximately 94% of the web

So now that you can test how you stack up to the rest of the web, the next question becomes how do you compare to your competitors. You can check this pretty easily a couple different ways. Web Page Test is a good web interface you can use to check page speed and Show Slow has automated tracking tools that let you continually monitor pages. I really like using Web Page Test as you can set the location to San Jose (fairly close to Mountain View).

How Important is Site Speed?

My interpretation of what Google has said

At this point, the question becomes how important is load time. While increasing your site speed is really important and should be done for the user’s experience, it can also improve your conversion rate, this section will only look at how page speed affects SEO.

“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal”

I think this means that site speed will affect only queries where other ranking signals are very close or when the load time is exceptionally poor. If competing pages have high relevancy scores and close link metrics (which isn’t probable), page speed may come into play. Additionally, I believe that site speed could negatively hurt you if your page takes an excruciatingly painful amount of time to load.

Matt Cutts was nice enough to blog about this topic when he was on vacation and added onto the above statement with:

“That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.”

Basically, this isn’t going to shake up the top ten; when it is seen, it will probably be seen in keywords ranking much lower than the top ten.

My Unscientific Experiment

I decided to do a bit of unscientific research, I took a few of the mostpopular search terms for 2010 (iPad, chatroulette, free, Justin Bieber) as well as two keywords that get a lot of link love (here, home) and collected the load time for the top 20 results of each keyword. The data ranged from 1.062 to 58.881 seconds.

As you can see in the above chart, there are some REALLY slow sites ranking in the top 20. I wanted to see if these sites just happened to be running slow at the time or if a second measurement would show that the slow sites are really faster. A week after I took the original measurements, I re-timed any page with a time over 15 seconds (which totaled 18 pages). While some sites showed significant variance the majority did not change that much. The average change was an improvement of 1.72 seconds, or 4%.

The average site speed for the 120 different results was 9.58 seconds while the standard deviation for this data set was 9.86 seconds.

According to the normalized distribution (as well as simply looking at the data), you are categorically slow if your page takes more than 19.44 seconds to load as only 15.86% of sites in the top 20 results from this sample were slower than this. Using the site speed equation described earlier, if your site takes 19.45 seconds to load, you are only faster than 0.3% of the web.

How to Improve Your Site Speed

If you want to improve your SEO, I would suggest buildingalink instead of focusing on speed (unless your site is currently extremely slow). That said, speed is a metric you should be trying to improve in order to improve the overall user experience. To decrease your load time, there are a few best practices you should follow:

Minimize HTTP Requests - Your pages will load faster if they have to wait for fewer HTTP requests. This means reducing the number of items that need to be loaded, such as scripts, style sheets, and images.

Combine all of your CSS into an external file and link to it from the <head> section each page instead of loading it in the HTML of a page. This allows the external page to be cached so that it loads faster. JavaScript should be handled in a similar fashion as CSS.

Use CSSsprites whenever possible - This combines images used in the background into one image and reduces the number of HTTP requests made.

Make sure your images are optimized for the web - If you have Photoshop, this can be done by simply clicking “save for web” instead of “save”. By optimizing the formats of the images you are essentially formatting the images in a smarter way so that you end up with a smaller file size. Smashing Magazine has a nice article on optimizing png images.

Use server side caching - This creates a html page for a URL so that dynamic sites don't have to build a page each time that URL is requested.

Use Gzip - Gzip will significantly compress the size of the page sent to the browser which then uncompresses the information and displays it for the user. Many sites who use Gzip are able to reduce the file size by upwards of 70%. You can see if sites are using Gzip and how much the page has been compressed by using GID Zip Test.

Use a Content Delivery Network - Using a CDN allow your users to download information in parallel, helping your site to load faster. CDNs are becoming increasingly affordable with services like Amazon CloudFront.

Reduce 301 Redirects - Don’t use 301 redirects if possible; definitely don’t stack 301’s on top of each other. 301 redirects force the browser to a new URL and require the browser to wait for the HTTP request to come back.

If you want to do further research on improving your site speed, Google has a good list of helpful articles for optimizing your page speed here that are much more in-depth than the above suggestions. To get suggestions specific to your website, tools like YSLOW and the HTML suggestions in Google Webmaster Tools are great resources.

The ultimate failure of any study that attempts to isolate site speed as a ranking factor is that poor site speed also is a reflection of a poor site, and thus, one that also attracts less links, CTR, time on site, and other positive factors Google may be including in it's algo. This would make causation really, really difficult to pin down.

But the ultimate POSITIVE we should all think of when Matt Cutts says "less than 1% of queries are impacted by this ranking change" (should we believe him, and I do) is that with that new <1% change, when compounded with the other congruent, beneficial changes we will see in the way of time on site, conversions, UX, more links, etc - we will see a much bigger than 1% increase in our search rankings by making dedicated efforts towards improving our site speed, whether or not the actual algo is 1% or more influenced by actual site speed or not.

That should be the takeaway, as is almost all SEO stuff these days that isn't purely "build links", like brand signals.

I would still caution, though, as Geoff does - do this stuff because it HELPS EVERYTHING ELSE, not because of your SEO, because the SEO is the spot where you will see the most minimal impact - even though we now know, for sure, that there is some sliver of actual SEO impact to be had.

Slow as hell, and I'd hate to see what it looks like on IE7, but it garnered just about as many links as possible for an iPhone app page. So your claim that "poor site speed also is a reflection of a poor site, and thus, one that also attracts less links, CTR, time on site, and other positive factors" is not valid in all cases.

Correlation is not causation, correlation is not causation, correlation is not causation. No one factor will CAUSE any of these things, but they will always INFLUENCE them. Other things, like having a super-HQ app, can always outweigh them every time.

First off, I'm not retarded, I can read your sentence just fine without you needing to repeat it like I'm an idiot. Next, I wasn't even disagreeing with your overall ideology that speed as a factor is damn near impossible to trace. ("The other-things equal" assumption in SEO almost never applies since you have linking you can't control, and other external factors out of control).

Also, you were the one who insisted on correlating lower links with slower load speed.

Doesn't make sense why you'd project that on me. In fact, my response can be broken down to "that's correlation without causation"

It sounds like you're both saying the same thing. Ross is noting that in many cases, good site speed is indicative of other positive things going on with a site. Joe's noting a great example of a slow-loading site that bucks this trend (I do love http://benthebodyguard.com/ - brilliant viral marketing through design).

Just wanted to also make a quick reminder that we like to keep things TAGFEE in the blog comments, especially in this case where there's such agreement!

"If you want to improve your SEO, I would suggest building a link instead of focusing on speed (unless your site is currently extremely slow). That said, speed is a metric you should be trying to improve in order to improve the overall user experience."

I agree - Speed isn't the most important thing for SEO, but it's not completely irrelevant, and SEO nerds like us are focused on optimizing every little possible thing we can, and when speed impacts other things as well, why ignore it? Speed increase is one of the things I've been focusing on this month - I learned how to do CSS sprites just a couple weeks ago and it's pretty fun! I definitely rejoice when my Google Webmaster Tool crawl stats hits a new low on the load time graph.

Really enjoyed the article, it had some great information, but your statistics application is incorrect.

The data is left-skewed, but you've applied the empirical rule and a bell-shaped distribution, causing you to lose about 16% of your data (values less than zero don't make sense in regards to page load times). If your data is skewed then you can't accurately apply the empirical rule, but instead have to rely on tchebysheff's theorem which only provides approximations.

The SEO effect of decreasing page load times would be minimal unless you are currently one of those being penalized for extremely long load times. Instead the area you are going to find the most value is Conversion Rate Optimization, where a decrease in page load time could mean a 200% increase in conversions.

It's like having pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the side. You can choose a bigger bucket (more traffic through SEO), or a smaller hole (more action takers through CRO).

A great actionable post. Even though page speed and load time don't appear to be a massive factor, it's always beneficial to consider SEO factors which are directly related to user experience on your website. As an SEO it's easy to get bogged down in numbers and clicks rather than visitors. Excellent list of page-speed improvements too, thanks. - Jenni

If I do a search on Google, I do not see any slow loading pages in the natural search. That’s great, well done Goggle on eliminating the junk from your serps, and that is what I feel Google’s only objective is here.

If you have a super duper fast loading site, it does not mean you’re going to rank on the first page of Google.

I would still buy from a site that loads reasonably well to a site that loads super fast, but if I saw a test to see if conversion rates would improve by having reasonable to super fast loading pages, I wouldn’t be surprised if the results were similar.

Our reasons for improving our page loading speed:
1. Larger percent of rural dial-up site visitors in our niche.
2. Better site visitor experience.
3. If Google makes a section in Webmaster Tools and Page Speed, it must be important. Maybe it is not so important now, but why not be ready. If it takes less time to spider a site, does it not make sense that it saves someone some money somewhere. Hmmmm...

Interesting post, Geoff... and I've to tell you that has the great quality to make very understandable the Page Speed topic.

As you say (and Google itself too), I don't believe that the Page Speed is a first level ranking factor, but... using the Long Tail metaphore, adding all the low level ranking factors you could outrank your competitors when all the others factors are almost equal.

Personally, I think that Google put a big enphasis to Page Speed in order to oblige people to reconsider usability alarming them that it was also an SEO factor. "Better the speed of your page and you will see also a conseguence in your rankings (and your users will be happier)".

Finally, in order to better the speed of my page, I also tend to host images, videos and every other multimedia content on different clouded services.

Regardless Whether it saves Google money spidering faster loading website in a realm of the internet fast loading pages should always be a priority.

It's not like speed optimization is some thing new, I have been working on Website development for probably 12 years now and as much as I remember it's always been a criteria for proper website development. Of course it is a criteria most choose to ignore.

Too often we are spoiled by our fast internet connections. Most of us are probably tech sauvy to one degree or another and maintain our computers well. But there are a lot of people out there with either slow internet or slow computers/browsers. I deal with friends all the time complaining about how their internet is slow and when you investigate it's a software issue.

So just because an overstuffed page still loads decent for me, I shouldn't be happy since a lot of people may still find it bothersome.

I'm happy Google is doing this, regardless of their intentions. Even with out the SEO ramifications it forces a quality standard.

Hey Geoff, thanks a lot for the amount of work that was done to collect the information for this post! This proves that site speed is not the strongest ranking factor, but it does matter in some cases.

Some useful tips here, also when designing the website, if you aim to keep it simple and user-friendly, not using large images, and lots of modules, will also help in ensuring that the site load speed is good. I've recently started using Gzip on some of my CMS sites, and it does help, especially if you have lots of files that need to be fetched.

If you want to improve your SEO, I would suggest buildingalink instead of focusing on speed

I don't fully agree with you on this one. A fast site will lower your bouncerate and improve the overall effectiveness of your SEO campaign. People that search with quickly scan the landingpage to see if it is what they expected. Fast sites can help people decide faster.

I've seen some SEO campaigns that improved (bouncerate, conversions) only because of speeding up a site.

But probably only in very specific circumstances where, as Geoff says, page load time is well outside the normal range. I'm not saying it's impossible for improved site speed to have a positive impact on bounce or conversion, but in light of everything else, it doesn't seem terribly likely in all but extreme cases.

You are right; this was an editing error - These were two different bullet points (DNS and Serve resources from a consistent URL - http://bit.ly/dSVp5L ) that I meant to cut out entirely but ended up combining them into one.

Thanks for pointing this out; I have removed the incorrect statement from post - I appreciate the help.

One thing that may be of use but is missing from this is how Google is actually measuring the page load speed. I believe it is doing it using Google Toolbar and real world results.

This begs an interesting question, say you have a network with a slow connection into your office, is it causing your page speed to look slower than it actually is? It is fair enough to assume that you will look at the site a lot more often than other users.

Google Toolbar is the source according to Google: "Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser. It is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature."

That has always concerned me considering that isn't exactly a scientific way to collect data. Considering that this data is supposedly being used in the SERPs algorithm that's a troubling thought, even if it is just a tiny signal <1%, because a lot of SEO is trying to control the multitude of these tiny signals for the reason that they eventually do add up to make a significant difference.

Addressing the original question more specifically, I would consider not browsing my own site with the toolbar installed if my local connection was causing the pageload to be slower than for the average user. Conversely, if one can manipulate their own pageload time to decrease it (e.g. disable slow loading files for their IP), I wouldn't be shocked to see that individual trying to game the site performance system.

One of the things that slow down my page load speed are Google Analytics script, and other scripts that load from other servers. I have noticed that there seem to be variations on the download times on my site because of this as well. I am guessing, but it seems like it is traffic on their server.

A great site for page speed load times is gtmetrix.com. Thanks for the good post.

I think it's fairly clear that site speed is a small factor in Google's ranking algorithm. But what is true is that most searchers expect fast site load times (sub 5 seconds) and having a slow load time may not effect your site's ranking directly, but it's been my experience that it will absolutely impact your bounce rate. I'm not so sure how concerned Google is with site speed, but I'm positive searchers are.

Like Brian Reynolds above, it's the third-party scripts that seem to slow down our load times and we now keep these down to a minimum and have no hesitation in switching if their performance is too slow.

We use jQuery at latestdiscountvouchers.co.uk and had previously hosted the .js for this locally in combination with a jCarousel script. However, we've switched to using the free Google CDN for the main jQuery script (http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js) and still locally host the jCarousel script. This has reduced our initial page load speed by another 0.3 to 0.4s.

For initial page load on the homepage of the website above, there's are a few more improvements that can be done but they are just minor ones. We believe that most of our speed improvements are now completed. We could also use a CDN for further speed reductions, but don't see the need for this currently but will look at Amazon CloudFront that was mentioned above.

In terms of timings, we used WebPageTest.org (London, IE8) and the results said that it was 1.960s for our initial page load. The key point for us, with this, is that our page load is ahead of our major competitors, which is the source of our main performance benchmarks.

Speed is critical. Everyone likes things fast. Why the wait? Speed optimizing any website will give it an extra edge over its competition and a boost in rankings. I always implement speed optimization to all my clients regardless if they pay for it or not.Speed optimizing a website should be essential but not all web developers are implemtenting such practice.

Thanks for sharing great information. As google released for speed, we have started testing on some of our sites.. not only for google but it does help the conversion rates. You need unneeded elements, stack them in right order certainly helps both crawlers and users experience

Great article! Have you noticed the differences between webpagetest.org & tools.pingdom? My magento base install before optimisation on webpagetest.org is 7.902s yet on tools.pingdom AND iwebtool it is 2.65s & 2s, which surely is too good to be true for a non optimised magento install?

I am located in the UK and so is my hosting provider, on webpagetest I set the test to london IE7. The real page load time is probably more close to the 7 second mark as I haven't performed optimisation yet. Which score do you believe to be correct and any ideas why the big difference in times? Thanks

In my experience with SEO one thing is for sure. Google is all about Google. Google likes Google. The only thing Google likes as much as Google is money. Server time is money; big money on their scale. I wouldn't be so quick to downplay the importance of pagespeed. Now and especially in the future.

The user attention span is also getting shorter and shorter. Any edge you can achieve should be considered. If the Big G is giving bonus points for speed then I want them. Just My Opinion.

Site speed is really all about user-experience. I tell all my clients they should aim for 5 seconds or less for page load time. We live in a time when people expect instant gratification, so your website better be able to deliver! If people get restless waiting for the Internet to load on their phone, accessing a site from a computer better come in fast.

Interesting data Geoff, thanks for the post and research. I would have to agree that site speed plays a larger role in user experience than search rankings, but should be tracked and worked on nonetheless. Thanks Geoff.

I'm sure we all knew about this for a very long time but some are just plain old stubborn and refuse to believe it. Google is pushing Search Engine Optimization to a whole new level, we'll all be soon called world wide web optimization experts.

Ive not been able to identify any gains with improved page speed, even on large transactional sites that Google reports as having major swings in load times over long periods of time.

I think its down to the fact that the user experience is pretty much the same i.e. the important stuff loads up front, its just secondary stuff that hangs, increasing load time count but having no actual shopping impact

I don't suggest practically optimising to the graph in Google Webmaster Tools, Id optimise for what feels fast to the user

An excellent post explaining site speed and page load time graphically and mathematically.

Hope Google adds this explanation to site performance in webmaster tools as it is still under labs. (Just a Suggestion)

But , yes site speed has to be given importance to from the user experience point of you but from the SEO perspective as you mentioned, it is of importance only when sites having similar ranking factors have to be ranked then the site with less page load time may tend to have a better ranking.

Hence, this as a SEO ranking factor is not used in its absolute terms as such but only on comparative basis.

But again of course if the page load time is abnormally high then it can affect the ranking in absolute terms also.

I never got why combining stylesheets would improve performance because....most of the stuff I work on is in the e-commerce sector. I need some styles that'll only be required on product pages, and some styles that'll only be required on listing pages. The more CSS a browser has to load, the slower the page load right? That means a visitor who lands right on a product page from a search engine (which I would hope to happen of course) and clicks straight through and buys never needed to load all those styles for listing pages that he's not even going to see. Like I said, maybe I sound dumb saying this, but I did mess about with this and an aggregated stylesheet did seem to negatively impact overall page load time.

CSS and JavaScript combining, while certainly beneficial and easily implemented through utilities and handlers, doesn't often address the complexities of larger websites. The challenge is combining the correct scripts while ignoring the rest. I'm usually able to accomplish this through a custom web handler that intercepts .css, .js and .axd requests, and caches/gzips the combined script output. However, my handlers are intelligent enough to know what scripts to combine and when to combine them.

Simple GZIP compression makes it much easier and more reassuring to combine everything into one script - regardless if that script is used. GZIP will of course limit the size impact the combined script would otherwise have had on the page's performance.

I have seen dramatic improvements in page performance by simply enabling some combination of script combining, cacheing and compression. Additionally, remember that most users will visit your site with an empty cache set, which makes it all the more prudent to build your websites with performance in mind!!

The amount of bytes is not really the problem, the fact that 4 different stylesheets need 4 extra http calls and block 4 of the 6 pipelines a browsers uses to download stuff is the problem. Combining those sheets will lead to 1 pipeline being used so the browser can use the other 5 for other things. You only need 1 http call, and the sheet will be cached for use in following pages.

The fact that Google Page Speed says you need to remove unnecessary CSS only counts for CSS declarations that aren't used on the whole site.

I have optimized a lot of sites, and reducing and spreading (per hostname) the amount of http request is always a big step in improving a page's load time.

The logic for using one aggregated stylesheet seems to be that after the initial download it's stored in the browser cache, whereas if the stylesheet is different on every page it would need to be loaded every time. So using one stylesheet would make sense for smaller, template-driven sites where most of the pages will be using identical styles.

For larger sites and situations like the one you describe, splitting stylesheets up by section might actually be the better approach (as your tests seem to confirm). While the cost of loading unused styles is probably fairly small, it all adds up, and you don't want to be in the situation where large amounts of the code aren't required for the current page.

Having the bulk of the site styles in one file, with section-specific code in another, seems like it should be fine. While automated tools might not "like" more than one stylesheet, they shouldn't always be taken literally, as long as you know why you are doing what you are doing.

It's worth spending time improving site speed, just to make visiting your site a better experience for real users, never mind the search engines. There is nothing worse than clicking a link and waiting for a ton of stuff to load (usually flash ads). So if this makes webmasters think again about loading and speed issues, it's a good thing all round, even if the effect on search rankings is minimal.

Besides being ranked in the top 10, speed and visual appeal are the most important factors for higher conversion rates. I notice other business websites and think to myself "Wow, they are ranked very high for having a crap website". If only people would fully understand the first impression of customers they would do more business and make more $$$.

I can put conclusion that, if website takes 6 to 8 seconds so, don't need to worry. We just need to focus on link building factor & try to develop such good external links which can help me to target specific keyword.

BTW: Thanks for your great post & looking forward to read more posts on On page SEO.

This totally goes in hand with my ethos about what Google are doing: giving people what they want.

Page speed is really important to me (and most other people) when browsing the web, so it's good to do it even without SEO in mind :-). Thanks for the article though, like the GID Zip Test... I didn't know you could compress certain things, I only really use it to archive random files.

Good article, while currently the page speed signal is quite new, who’s to say in the future that its importance will not grow? As the Internet goes more mobile, I believe page speed will become more important. Google has releases an apache module http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html to help with improving page speed performance.It will optimise images on the fly, compact ccs and js files. I wrote a blog post http://www.getfound.ie/blog/improve-page-speed-with-mod-pagespeed/ on installing and configuring this module. I found good improvements in page speed load time, particularly with images and slower wordpress based pages. I did however have a problem getting the javascript compacting to work "rewrite_javascript" (and gave up). Overall I found installing this module as the fastest way of improving page speed for larger sites.For Google (and all search engines) the a faster websites responds, the more efficient their spidering will become, a small change to a website (says 1 second) loading speed multipled by 100K's websites by millions of pages would lead to substantial gains in efficiencies of their spidering processes, greater utilisation of servers and the need for less hardware. Put another way the faster a spider can do it job, the more spidering it can do over a given period of time, meaning that more can squeezed out of their existing servers. This will surely incentivized them to give more love to faster websites in the future.

I'm a noob SEO so plz forgive me if this sounds dumb. (I've been reading SEO sites like SEOMOZ Blog for a year and still fuzzy on a lot of things)

What I don't get is that I've tested my site performance taking into consideration Google crawler and user experience, but when my site got slower after adding some heavy content, my traffic from search engines increased, but the opposite when I sped it up!

Also, I'd love to know just how load time affects users' tendency to leave/wait for "slow"/"fast" loading pages (assuming that there are two pages "slow" and "fast", and both are competitors for the same niche and keyword set with similar information).

It'd also be interesting to know if Google does (or is able to) give higher SERP to a "slow" page with low bounce rate (user stayed because page was useful) than a "fast" page with a high bounce rate (page was not what user wanted). I'd like to think that this would reflect how the user reacts to a page and while Google can't know what people are thinking as they browse a page, it can at least tell if a page is earning time from visitors or not.

I've checked around on this but had no luck. If there's an old SEOMoz post you can refer me too, that'd be great, too!

What sort of "heavy" content are you referring to? It's expected that a site has some images, maybe a video or two, multiple content types shouldn't hurt you in SERPs. If you're adding more images, use appropriate alt and title tags and you should be fine.

I think users have a tendency to give websites a chance once they get there (inherint goodwill from "Don't Make Me Think") and if your content is readable, and what they are looking for, then they'll stick around. If your page takes more than a few seconds to load, then you are going to lose their interest and they'll bounce.

Google already tracks clickthrough rates on their SERPs, so I think they could probably guess at which pages get the last click to indicate the user found what they wanted. If I saw the top result got a lot of clicks, but the users came back and hit the next page down, I would think that users didn't find what they needed on result 1.

Some great information and and research you have compiled. Increasing your site speed is a highly important area as Google is about speed, if your website is not loading both fast for desktop and mobile users and your competitors are you need to look at it. Whilst some information in regards to site speed changes may be a little technical for some, I think a easy one for any one using the wordpress platform is to check out the: WP Super Cache plugin I have tested it on a few websites I run and speed increases have been found.

"Increasing your site speed is a highly important area as Google is about speed"

I'd be interested to see how you justify that statement given that Matt Cutts said fewer than 1% of search queries would be affected. So if you're site is that slow you fall into this category then however they find your site (via search or otherwise) they'll get annoyed and leave. So please, how is it a "highly important area because Google is about speed"? Google is about quality, of which speed is just one tiny factor. Sorry, but statements like this one you made really cheese me off, it's so fundamentally misleading.

The original post above makes this quite clear in the paragraph "how important is site speed?"

I had a completely different take away form the post. When Geoff said:

If you want to improve your SEO, I would suggest building a link instead of focusing on speed (unless your site is currently extremely slow). That said, speed is a metric you should be trying to improve in order to improve the overall user experience

I took that to mean that as far as SEO is concerned, there isn't a lot of value in increasing site speed. But as far as Usability goes, it's a definite factor

Google is becomming more about speed. Hence the changes to instant nad many other changes I have noted. Where exactly did I state it was the most important factor for SEO? No it is not the most important yet yet is a factor that is becomming more and more imprtant as web users need for speed increases. If you work in high competition niches and have a website where the load speed is slow/poor and your competitors all have fast loading sites it will have a impact not only on bounce rate yet also on serp positioning.

What is SEO about it is about finding something which works best for you I have tested speed changes and it works well for me, sure it is not the best SEO quick win, sure it is not in the top 20 but it is becomming more and more important.

Google is becomming more about speed. Hence the changes to instant nad many other changes I have noted. Where exactly did I state it was the most important factor for SEO? No it is not the most important yet yet is a factor that is becomming more and more imprtant as web users need for speed increases. If you work in high competition niches and have a website where the load speed is slow/poor and your competitors all have fast loading sites it will have a impact not only on bounce rate and user experience.

What is SEO about it is about finding something which works best for you I have tested speed changes and it works well for me where the website is poor, you make changes and you see some increase. Sure it is not the best SEO quick win, sure it is not in the top 20 but it is becomming more and more important in my oppinion.